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<p class="MsoNormal">Greetings,<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Here is a summary of some of the changes we've made to help users search tickets. If there is interest, I can submit feature requests or provide more details. (See also another approach at
<a href="http://requesttracker.wikia.com/wiki/Full_Text_Search_Portlet">http://requesttracker.wikia.com/wiki/Full_Text_Search_Portlet</a> )<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">We index our database and normally want to do a Content Search. One of our managers wanted to type "cats OR dogs" in the "Search..." box and get a list all tickets with either cats or dogs in the content. And he wanted each occurrence
to be highlighted when a ticket is displayed. And he didn't want to use the full Search/Build.html interface unless absolutely necessary. So I tinkered a bit. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">1. When viewing a listing of tickets from Search/Results.html, we show the query just above the list of tickets (similar to what is seen below a chart from Search/Chart.html). This is very useful when following a link from a dashboard
or RT at a Glance when it might not be obvious exactly what was searched. Best Practical added more callbacks in Results.html (after v4.0.8), and we print the query from a callback. It might be nice to have a user option to display the query directly from
Results.html. This might require some CSS adjustment for it to look reasonable in all browsers, especially if the query is long.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">2. When doing a Content Search, we highlight the matching text when the ticket is displayed. This required adding a few lines in Ticket/Elements/ShowMessageStanza to wrap a <span> around the match and creating a CSS entry with a yellow
background. No doubt I am doing this in a very inefficient and inelegant way, but this does not seem to slow down the ticket display.
<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">3. I wrote a modified version of Search/Simple.html. This is used as the action when one uses the "Search..." box, or if one chooses Simple Search from the menu. I did not want to touch RT::Search::Googleish, so there are some very ugly
hacks to manipulate the query string before and after calling Googleish for some of the effects. Very ugly, and a bit specific for our site. Key features:
<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">a) Content Search (instead of Subject) is on by default. [perhaps RT should do this in Build.html and Simple.html whenever the database is indexed].
<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">b) AND, OR, and Parentheses can be used between search terms. AND is assumed.
<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">c) Our users were not happy with the page displayed by the original Simple.html nor with the complexity of the full Search/Build.html. So as a compromise, I added a few arbitrary items:
<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> a drop down box to pick a queue; <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> check boxes to choose inactive/active status;<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> a text box with autocompletion to pick a requestor's email;<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> check boxes to choose to search on Subject or Content.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Regards,<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Jim Berry<o:p></o:p></p>
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